Google Battles Data Scraper SerpApi in Court

Google initiated legal action against SerpApi, a company specializing in web content scraping, for alleged copyright violations. The tech giant claims SerpApi employed "deceptive means" to harvest Google's search results on an "astonishing scale" and subsequently sell this data to clients, thereby contravening the Copyright Act.

Court documents reveal that SerpApi allegedly devised methods to bypass SearchGuard, a security measure Google implemented in January 2025 to prevent unauthorized scraping. SerpApi is accused of masking millions of daily automated queries to appear as legitimate user traffic, undermining Google's investments in licensed copyrighted content.

The lawsuit seeks a court order compelling SerpApi to cease circumventing Google's scraping restrictions and to destroy any technology facilitating these actions. This legal battle highlights ongoing tensions between search engines protecting their data and third-party services aiming to access and monetize it.